Matt Carr

Writer, journalist and campaigner

Matt Carr is a writer, journalist, author, and campaigner. His six published books, include The Infernal Machine, Blood and Faith: the Purging of Muslim Spain and the novel The Devils of Cardona. His next book The Savage Frontier: The Pyrenees in History and the Imagination, is due to be published next year.

We want to restore the courage, heroism and dignity, the adventure and discovery that is part of the experience of migration. As migrants and non-migrants, we want to celebrate and acknowledge the contributions that migrants have made to our country in the past and continue to make today.

No one familiar with Arron Banks's organisation will be remotely surprised by this. For those who still want to prevent this country from sliding into the same swamp, we need a different response. Last month Miller asked 'the decent people of Britain to come together in opposition to the hatred poisoning our country'.

What a difference seven weeks can make. When Theresa May broke her own pledge not to call an election I thought that yet another political calamity was about to unfold. The justification for the election was that parliament was 'blocking Brexit' and that a new mandate was necessary to allow May to negotiate Britain's exit from the UK more effectively.

And as bad as things look right now, we should believe that we can get through. And we should never allow ourselves to descend into the sewer that those who carried out last night's attacks would like us to sink into.

We know that some opinions will never be changed, but we also know that there are millions of people who are shocked and disturbed by the divisive and dangerous politics, and we urge them to join us on February 20 and make One Day Without Us a day to remember.

Today, faced with gloomy possibilities in Iraq that include the imminent disintegration of the Iraqi state... the Obama administration is once again considering air strikes as a policy option. And as Iraqi cities once again loom in the Imperium's bomb-sights, it's instructive to cast our eyes back on this less-than-glorious relationship between the United States, bombs and Iraq.

So far no one seems to know exactly who installed these spikes, but whoever it was ought to be congratulated on artistic grounds, if nothing else. Because what they have done, however inadvertently, is produce a haunting symbol of the institutionalised amorality and social cruelty that defines our era.

It is now clear that the freakish peroxide conman Jimmy Savile was one of the nastiest and most vicious paedophiles in British history. At present, according to new research commissioned from the NSPCC by BBC Panorama, there are more than 500 reports of abuse against him, and that figure is almost certainly an understatement, given the almost complete freedom that Savile enjoyed to do whatever he liked to whomever he liked.

Today Nigel Farage's 'people's army' will set off down to the polling stations today to keep its appointment with destiny. This is one appointment that destiny would really be well-advised not to get out of bed for, because we have seen a great deal of Ukip these last few weeks, and it hasn't been a pretty sight.

Is Nigeria intending to negotiate the release of the 276 kidnapped schoolgirls or it preparing to attack Boko Haram? The answer to this question does not seem clear, even to the Nigerian government itself. Throughout much of the crisis the administration of president Goodluck Jonathan has dropped fat hints that it is engaging or attempting to engage in some kind of behind-the-scenes dialogue with the kidnappers.

A party that is rotten and phoney to its very core, that is perpetrating an astonishingly brazen con-trick on the nation's embittered and credulous voters, and which attracts racists, bigots and xenophobes not in spite of its policies but because of them.

Religion tends to remain in the background of British politics, and until recently David Cameron was no exception. There was a time, back in 2008, when Cameron compared his religious faith to 'the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes.'

Attempts by democratic governments to ban books rarely work out well. If the book is banned on grounds of public morality (<em>Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer</em>), then the writer nearly always wins in the end and the government that tried to suppress their work is likely to end up looking puritanical, cloven-footed and often pig-ignorant.

Imagine readers, that you are Richard Littlejohn, star columnist of the <em>Daily Mail</em>. One day you are lolling around your Florida mansion, wondering what you put in your weekly column when you get a phone call or an email from your editor Paul Dacre. Perhaps it goes something like this:..

Most members of the public are concerned about something. Maybe it's the environment, income inequality, the cost of childcare, creeping privatization of the NHS, unemployment, poverty, the punitive treatment of disability claimants, foodbanks, or the seemingly endless appetite of the British ruling elite for foreign military adventures.